Nuts & Bolts #1: Blod Orn – Prologue

For my first Nuts & Bolts article I'll try to elucidate how I used various resources to guide the story of my Viking Character in the Talomir setting.

So I started with a given, we want a Viking theme in Talomir so we start in Mirholme. I tried some random generators for a prophecy for this character and ended up narrowing down a list from donjon, but as of right now it still doesn't fit. Or at least I don't know how to make use of it yet in the story.

What did make sense was the Age of Fable character motivation table. I believe the available tables were Barbarian, Peasant and Noble. A quick d6 roll gave me Noble (1-2, 3-4, 5-6 if you're wondering). Rolling on that table I received a result of [Committed a crime and was let off on condition they go into exile (innocent)]

Mirholme is made up of two provinces so 1-3 capital (western) province, 4-6 Eastern. And I got Capital.

So it was at this point that I felt I needed to flesh out the back story a little more. I came up with the idea of a succession struggle and our main character being framed for kidnapping the clergy who would be needed to coronate the next King. I could have just written a narrative, but I decided to give Mythic GME a try to help me drive the story forward.

Mythic Questions ( Chaos Level 5):

Is the person who framed him a family member? [50/50 Roll 90 = No, 91 would have been an exceptional no.]

Is the person who framed him now the King? [ 50/50 Roll 73 = No]

Has the person who framed him been granted possession of his lands? [Likely Roll 97 = Exceptional No]

Does he have a younger brother who is now in charge? [Very Likely Roll = 76 Yes]

Does this brother support the new king? [Likely Roll = 34 Yes]

Is the new King from the other province of Mirholme? [Very Likely Roll = 74 yes]

So from this line of questioning we see that the younger brother has now taken over our heroes duties and has, while not framing him outright, supported the rival faction.

Now we had characters to name. I chose to name the characters with the Age of Blood naming table and I made up an IPT file to do so which you can get here.

Main characters:

Our Hero: Hemming Wulfgarson, his brother (Dag), the High Priest (Stakard Svafrlamirson), the evil Jarl (Aun Bjarnisson) and the characters of Oleg Vikarson (the young spearman) and Fafnir Svafrlamirson (the grizzled vet). These last two were his shieldmates so to speak who would help him on his adventures, essentially so he wouldn't be killed outright.

This brought about one more Mythic question:

Are Fafnir and the priest brothers? They have the same patronimic. [Likely Roll = 58 Yes]

I ended up not really doing anything with this story line, but it may be useful later.

So that is how I used Mythic and Age of Fable to start the campaign.